“Two Hills” Series

I started this series a while ago with a couple of sketches done from a few photos my daughter shot with my phone — blurry shots of hills and bushes near our house that she took at dusk. The photos have a really mysterious, moody quality, that I was hoping to translate into a few interesting pieces.

I moved on to a couple of pencil drawings, one brighter and one that’s more tonal in nature. I then moved on to a few pastels — the first has a very bright color palette of yellows, greens, blue-greens, orange, and red. The next is more tonal in nature, with a darker palette of blues, yellow-greens, and blue-greens, contrasted with an orange highlight in the dawn sky in the background. The last also has a tonal palette, with cooler blues, greens, and purples contrasted with a yellow highlight in the sky.

After the pastels I created one oil painting — my goal was to create a mysterious mood, similar to the feeling I got from the original photos the series is based on. I used a bright but dark, tonal palette of blues and greens, with the highlight areas of the hills in brighter yellows and yellow-greens. The focal point of the piece is where the yellow hill in the middle ground meets the sky in the background, where there is the orange glow of the setting sun behind the hill at dusk. I used a soft reflected backlighting on the tops of the bushes to add to the mysterious mood. I was pretty happy with the way the painting turned out, and received some nice comments on the piece online.

Not sure if I’ll return to this series or not in the future, but you never know, time will tell…